Ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth, but how is it that
ye do not discern this time?”
How is it indeed! For “this time” is one of the most fated and historic
times in the history of the world--a time when we may perhaps be called
upon to witness the commencement of the downfall of the greatest of
Empires--the British;--when we may have to watch its magnificent
fabric, once the envy of all other nations, crumbling before our very
eyes--its pillars of state pulled down by riotous demagogues--its
splendid traditions put to shame by both parties in its Parliament--by
the one in sheer outlawry, by the other in no less disgraceful
inaction. We can look on at this and wonder what new power will arise
from its ruins, but we may not dare to prophesy till after the event!
For this is but “the beginning of sorrows.” It little matters that
the fools and jesters of the hour make mockery of all those who seek
to warn off the misguided people from the quicksands whither they are
rushing--fools and jesters there have always been and always will be,
ready to toss ribaldry in the face of Deity itself without compunction.
But the evil which darkly threatens modern civilisation is too near
and too evident to be lightly “laughed down.” Every student of history
knows that when the foundations of religious faith are shaken--when
it becomes “a house divided against itself,” then national disaster
is close at hand. Man, deprived of any high spiritual ideal of life,
quickly reverts to mere selfish savagery. The Dean of St. Paul’s,
called “the gloomy Dean” by a halfpenny daily, because he dares to
speak truths which are not altogether pleasant hearing, must have
thought long and deeply, and fully made up his mind as to what he meant
when he said: “It is the duty of the clergy to maintain that it is
‘other worldliness’ which alone had transformed and could transform
this world”--which means that it is only spiritual progress which can
make material progress valuable and lasting. The inward enlightenment
and uplifting of the soul or spirit of each individual man and woman
towards the highest and bravest ideals of life and love, and conformity
to the laws of creation as made plainly visible in Nature, is the only
true civilisation. This lesson is taught by every scientific truth we
are permitted to investigate. It is not preaching or platitudinism--it
is an incontestable eternal Fact. Our lives on this planet were
intended to be lives of joy, health, beauty, love, and mutual
helpfulness--and where we depart from this intention we insult and
disobey the Creator, whose design is one of gradual development towards
ultimate perfection. We wrong Him when we call this beautiful world “a
vale of tears”--for our misfortunes and diseases are chiefly our own
fault, and certainly are not His doing. It is time we stood up with a
glad courage, giving thanks for all the benefits He has showered upon
us without asking for more. Any creed that is selfish and whining is no
creed for the soul that aspires to the highest progress. If we invite
evils upon ourselves we must expect them to come--nothing will hold
them back if we are trespassers against natural and spiritual laws.
The Reverend H. Mayne Young, preaching in Westminster Abbey itself,
pronounced the following words with a noble daring:--
“The day is not far distant when, unless the Church of England freely
re-states and re-models her creeds so as to meet the requirements of
the age, she will be left stranded on the shores of time, while the
tide of this modern life will leave her for ever farther and farther
behind--a sad warning of the inevitable results of an iron-bound system
of worn-out dogmas and lifeless traditions.”
“Worn-out dogmas and lifeless traditions!” A bold utterance, but true!
And what is true of the Church of England is equally true of all the
Churches in the world to-day, notably that of Rome. Man, walking in
a darkness of destroyed illusions, is at that point when he may well
exclaim with the Apostle--“Who will deliver me from the body of this
death?”
It needs no gift of prophecy and no special intuition to see that
we are on the brink of some tremendous change in the destinies of
the human race. Everything points to it--our tottering creeds, our
fluctuating standard of manners and morals. What it is, what it may be
no one tries to imagine. People instinctively feel they would rather
not think too much about anything, or analyse the condition in which
they find themselves. There is “no time” for it, they say. Why is there
no time? Is the clock of the universe running down and are the works
giving out? Materially speaking, we know that the slightest tilt of
the earth on its axis would cause a complete redistribution of its
continents and seas, sweeping away every vestige of civilisation as we
now know it. We never consider this, imagining that such a catastrophe
is not possible. Yet God has willed it so before, and may will it so
again. Every physical movement is preconceived by a mental or spiritual
one. The Great Unrest is at present one of Spirit which will gradually
dominate Matter and move it to equal but louder disturbance. We spin
on our earth in a gathering storm-cloud between two fathomless gulfs,
the Past and the Future--our Present is the result of the past, and
our future will equally be the work of the Present. We know that there
is a God of Love to serve, and his Nature-laws to obey, and knowing
this, Ourselves alone must decide whether we _will_ do as we should, or
whether we shall be _forced_ to do as we would not!
THE WHIRLWIND
It has come at last--that great Storm foretold by national weather
prophets--it has come with all the devastating force of a fury long
suppressed; and the black cloud has gathered over our heads while yet
we drowsed in a dream of sunshine. With a sudden thunderous rush, as
though a god or a demon should tread the spaces of the air, heaven
has let loose the whirlwind--the whirlwind of War, and far more than
War--the whirlwind of Destiny. It has come because it was bound to
come, by the Unwritten Law and Code Invisible. Men of the world
who form governments, make civilisations, and build up empires are
always forgetting this Unwritten Law--the Hand behind the scenes--the
inexorable and eternal forward movement of the Cosmos, which in its
pre-determined progress overrides their best laid plans and makes
chaotic havoc of their most sagacious intentions. Yet it is a perfectly
straight and simple Law after all--one that has existed from the
beginning of things, and that will ever exist--the law of Nature,
visibly expressing the Mind of God, and immutably set against the
predominance of evil. It is an output of the Divine Will, resolving
itself easily into common, even domestic forms, adapted to the needs
of individuals and nations alike. Nature often conducts herself like a
practical housewife bent on spring cleaning.
“Where there is dirt,” she says, “it shall be removed; where there is
confusion there shall be order.”
And her “cleaning-up” day is invariably a frightful thing. The noise
of her sweeping and scouring resounds like thunder through the world.
It occurs periodically, marking epochs of history, and we read of
its results in the past with placid incredulity, setting down much
to exaggeration and more to deliberate lying, idly amused meanwhile
at the ridiculous notion, suggested by certain fools, that any such
uproar and disaster should ever be experienced by Ourselves who have,
so we consider, “advanced” in civilisation and wisdom, and thereby
in self-control--Ourselves whose “culture” seems to our own judgment
a finer and more perfect attainment than divine justice. The tornado
of the French Revolution, the pitiless ravages of the Napoleonic wars
have appeared to us like a tale that is told, “full of sound and
fury, signifying nothing”--and we have lazed the time away, getting
and spending, in the peaceful high noon of national prosperity and
contentment, feeling confident that we should never in our day be
shaken from our centre-poise of complacent self-satisfaction by
anything of larger disturbance than occasional family quarrels gotten
up more for the sake of varying the monotony of peace than with any
serious intent. And now, lo!--the bolt falls--the vials of wrath and
judgment are opened and poured forth over land and sea--the whirlwind
is upon us, and we who slept are awakened by its sweeping rage, its
rattling rain, its lightning flashing against our windows of security,
and we leap to our feet, startled but not alarmed--unprepared, maybe,
but not unready. We realise what the storm means, and we know how to
weather it; we are not afraid--we only wish we had not slept quite so
long!
Nevertheless, though our sleep may have been heavy, it has refreshed
our forces and has not diminished our energies. Our waking is to good
purpose. The very shame we feel at the length of our slumber is an
excellent tonic and invigorates us. Sleep shall no more weigh down our
eyelids--we are alert, strong, and resolute, even in the midst of the
whirlwind. For it is a storm in which we alone are not involved. It has
swept over a smaller nation than our own, all undeservedly--a little
sister nation with the heart of a thousand heroes beating in her small
bosom--and her unmerited sorrow has served as the keynote to strike all
that is in us of Character and Conduct. We see her defaced with blows,
insulted and outraged by ravening cruelties; and the chivalry born from
centuries of martial glory rises strong and full-armed in every man
that claims justice for her wrongs. We of Britain have not warred for
ourselves--our fight is for the better, broader freedom of the whole
world. The whirlwind has caught us up in the swoop of its revolving
wings solely that we may take our part in the purifying of the House of
Man. And our victory will be made manifest in the open response to our
inward intention.
* * * * *
The militarism of Prussia is a crime, springing from old roots of human
savagery and barbarism which should have died long ago. The brutal
War, made treacherous and bloody by new devices of destruction, the
inventions of fine science misapplied, was an outbreak of stupidity on
the part of an obtuse and stupid set of men, sodden with selfishness
and delirious with a drunken dream of World-Power. The teachings of
Treitschke and Nietzsche are the teachings of egotists with unsound and
ill-balanced brains. Nietzsche went mad, and howled his philosophies to
the walls of the padded room. Treitschke was covertly insane; like the
“secret drinker” who in public pretends he cannot touch strong liquor,
he assumed to be proud and sagacious when he was no more than crazily
self-obsessed. He preached the doctrine of Hate, and no sane man
ever did that. The German nation, accepting this sort of “Kultur” as
gospel, accepted the ravings of the mentally deficient, and, plunging
breast-high into a sea of brothers’ blood, proved itself infected
by the same madness as that which poisoned the veins of its mad
instructors. To any thoughtful student, looking on at such a frightful,
wicked, and overwhelmingly stupid slaughter of men by machinery there
can be nothing more terrible, more lonely or more accursed in all the
realm of fact or fiction than the figure of the Kaiser--the miserable
epileptic who is responsible for shrouding his “Fatherland” in the
black veil of mourning, and for drowning its peace and progress in a
flood of widows’ and orphans’ tears. Mentally unbalanced, physically
inefficient, and morally lacking--living as one pursued by the Furies
in an armoured cage, and surrounded by guards on earth and in air,
lest by chance his “Gott” should kill him, he moves one to amazement
and pity--for the whirlwind has him in its centre, twirling him round
and round like a veritable mannikin of sport for the dread gods of
destiny--a mannikin who hardly knows how he came to be where he is, or
where he will find himself when the storm is past. Meanwhile his voice
is heard above the storm shouting “To England! England! The one foe! My
Mother’s land, which I hate! Would that every drop of British blood in
my veins might be drained out of me!”
Well, why not? A calf has been bled before now, and not a drop of
its mother’s blood has been left in its carcase--there is nothing to
prevent this desirable consummation for the Kaiser since he so devoutly
wishes it. The whirlwind may strip him yet, and perform this required
kindness! But in the interval the arrogant and half-crazed “War Lord”
has sacrificed the best flower and strength of Germany’s manhood to
his criminal and insatiable lust of power. The German people have not
yet realised the mercilessness of this military despot--but when they
do--when they count the desolate homes, the ruined trades, the lost
commerce, the ravaged lives and broken hearts which mark the “triumph”
of the stagey and spectacular “hero” they have worshipped, there will
be an end of the blind credulity with which they have followed a vain
ideal.
* * * * *
For us British, the Whirlwind is a grand thing. It is blowing
us fiercely clean of Self--it is tearing away from us the silly
sophistries of fashion and frivolity and showing us things in their
true light. Our ape-like jesters of the press, of the Bernard Shaw
type, who have mocked at all things holy, serious, and earnest, are
finding their proper level, and shrinking into corners where they
are scarcely seen--where it is to be hoped they may be peaceably
forgotten. Our “sex-problems,” our “advanced” women, our screaming Doll
Tear-sheets of militant suffrage--these trouble the air no more with
the hysterics which are engendered by having nothing useful to do. We
have no time for trifling. We are face to face with the long-despised
Obvious--“Life is real, life is earnest”--and we are casting off the
slough of political humbug and social sham, and are as one in the
splendid bond of patriotism and love of country. We may trust the
Storm; we may welcome the Whirlwind. It has come to clear the sky
of miasma and vapour--it is making light to show us where we truly
stand. If we are honest with ourselves we shall admit that in latter
years we have given ourselves over-much to the pursuit of material
gain and personal pleasure, we have neglected our faith in divine and
high ideals, and Self has been more or less our god; it was time that
we received a wholesome check and a warning before we lost all that
has made us great. We have responded swiftly to the goading spur--our
crust of selfishness was but thin after all, and has broken and melted
away in a flood of magnificent generosity and practical sympathy--for
never had nation a nobler Cause than ours, when, as brothers in arms
with our brave allies, we fought to right the unspeakable wrongs of
unoffending Belgium, and to aid in defending France from the invader
and usurper. Should the enemy conquer in this mighty struggle the whole
world will be the impoverished loser; should we and our allies win,
the whole world will gain by our victory and share with us a wider,
nobler freedom than before. It is for this cause that the Whirlwind
has come upon us--to cleanse a cancer from our midst, and to put away
from ourselves and our neighbours the dread contamination of a disease
involving the whole trend of civilisation. We may thank God for it,
despite all its terrors, its rain of blood, its thunders of the air
and sea, its swift death dealt to thousands of innocent souls--it is a
storm that was needed to clear the air. And when it is past, and the
sun shines once more, we shall realise that its causes were to be found
not in one nation only, but in many--in ourselves as well as in our
foes--and that some great and forceful movement of destiny was urgently
called for to sweep away from humanity the accumulating mass of its own
self-wrought evil. And if victory should be ours, it will behove us to
take it with all humility, giving thanks to God--“_lest we forget_!”
THE KAISER’S HARVEST OF DEATH
A CRIME OF STUPIDITY
(_First published in the “Sunday Times”_)
In every great national crisis, when war or revolution brings havoc
on existing civilisation and works sudden and violent change in all
social, political, and diplomatic relations, we are invariably able to
discover One Man--or at the most, perhaps, two or three men--primarily
responsible for the general upheaval.
History is impressively explicit concerning these personages. She
never fails to show us how, by some strange lack of the most ordinary
foresight and common sense, they stumble when apparently on the
height of success, and commit irreparable blunders which hasten their
careers to a disastrous close. Such was the case with Napoleon and
many other would-be Alexanders of ambition; but of all the tragic
blunderers of time surely none can equal or surpass the “War Lord” of
Germany. Here is a man who had the splendid chance of securing for
his country and people the largest share of the commerce of Europe;
it lay easily within his grasp. Yet he has let it go, like a handful
of sand and shells dropped by a child at play on the seashore. To
satisfy the personal cravings of a vaunting, blustering Egoism for
blood-and-thunder “effects” he has lost the peaceful conquest of a
world!
Amazing, deplorable, and incredible folly!--when such conquest could
have been gained without a blow, without the boom of a single gun,
without the explosion of a single shell! It could have been attained
in the only way by which any truly “civilised” nation should ever seek
supremacy--through the development of industry and commerce, and the
quiet assumption of the power that industry and commerce give. All
that we call “progress” should fortify the stand of human resolution
on this basis. It is not necessary, it is not even sane or decent that
any peoples should tolerate what Carlyle describes as “the spectacle of
men with clenched teeth and hell-fire eyes hacking one another’s flesh,
converting precious living bodies and priceless living souls into
nameless masses of putrescence, useful only for turnip manure”--which
is a rough but accurate picture of war deprived of all its devilish
excitement and glamour.
WASTED OPPORTUNITY
To Kaiser William more than to any other monarch of his time was given
the glorious chance of becoming the greatest benefactor of Germany
which that realm had ever known. He could have created for his people
such conditions of peace, happiness, and prosperity as were almost
incalculable. He stood in the broad sunshine of ripening trade--the
markets of the world were open to him--fields of wealth were spreading
around him on all sides, and his cheerfully working millions had but
to reap the grain their industries had sown and gather in a rich and
plenteous harvest. Why, then, in the name of all that is great, noble,
and pitiful, did he choose to make a harvest of death instead of life?
A TRAGIC WITNESS
During the grim and ghastly struggle at Verdun we are told the Kaiser,
standing “at safe distance,” watched through his field-glasses the
fiery mowing down of his countrymen to the number of forty-five
thousand! Does any one, reading this, take the trouble to pause and
consider what it means? Forty-five thousand strong, brave men in the
flower of manhood (for let us hope we are none of us so unjust as to
deny our enemies their strength or their courage); forty-five thousand
capable human beings fit for every sort of industrial labour--the
blood and bone of future generations--slaughtered like vermin; and
their Emperor, their sworn Defender and Protector, within sight-range,
looking on!
What a “Harvest Home”! Are we able to conceive the nature and
temperament of a monarch who _could_ so look on at this massacre of his
subjects and not rush among them to stop the advance of their serried
ranks and “massed formations,” resulting in such a wanton and wicked
waste of life? The crazy antics of Nero were mere child’s play compared
with this callous attitude of William of Hohenzollern; an attitude
which even his French foes cannot maintain. For, fired with vengeance
for old wrongs as they are, and bent on victorious justice, they have
declared themselves “sick with slaughter.”
“Such hecatombs,” writes Colonel Rousset, “cannot last. Our adversary,
while carrying his disregard of human life to the point of madness,
cannot go on throwing his soldiers into the charnel-house without
thinking of to-morrow.”
The losses of the Germans at Verdun have been estimated at 10,000 per
day! “I dream at night,” writes one French artillery officer, “of those
ghastly crumpled heaps of shattered gray-green bodies! Germany’s wives
and mothers must curse the Kaiser in their prayers!”
THE CRIME OF STUPIDITY
Voltaire is accredited with the saying that “the only crime is
stupidity.” According to this dictum one must come to consider the
“All-Highest War Lord” the greatest criminal of an epoch, his stupidity
being almost without parallel in history. What man, not entirely mad,
seeing a world of prosperity within reach of his hand would clench his
fist and knock the whole splendid sphere away from him at one blow! The
proposition seems absurd and untenable, yet it has been and continues
to be the Kaiser’s policy, or the policy of his ministers and advisers;
clear to all save those who remain perversely and wilfully blind.
For it is not too much to say that before the war Germany was pushing
quietly but surely through every branch of commerce. From triumph to
triumph she moved easily onward; everywhere her ramifications were
spreading like the vigorous roots of a fast-growing tree. In Great
Britain she had possessed herself of many of our trades; her goods
were everywhere; her cutlery, her glass, her woollens, her linens, her
dyes, her silver and copper ware, her chemicals--why, even our very
window-frames were “Made in Germany”! She was at work in our mines and
coal-fields; she was ahead of us in science, in invention, in industry
and general “thoroughness.”
And let us not forget that we were, or appeared to be, supinely
indifferent to her inroads on all that we used to claim as our “special
line” and particular property. We were, like Hamlet, “growing fat and
scant of breath.” We were disposed to indolence and self-indulgence,
and, when we saw Germans working _for_ us, and _by_ us, and _through_
us, taking the very tools out of our listless hands, we were agreeably
convinced that they saved us a deal of trouble. They worked so cheaply,
too!--and cheapness in necessary goods appealed to us, because it gave
us more to spend on racing and football. The “Space for Special News”
in our Press was not reserved (as intelligent foreigners conceive it
ought to be) for serious information on world’s business; but for
“Football Results” or cricket, in the respective seasons of these
gamesome athletics--and the very word “patriotism” was laughed out
of court as “Jingoism.” We gave the honours of heroes to our tennis
champions, and played about while the Germans worked. They worked--as
many of the British refuse to work; they saved--as many of the British
decline to save; they gained their ends, because by our very inertia we
gave them every opportunity to do so.
BRITISH APATHY
Mr. Hughes, Prime Minister of Australia, said in a recent speech
that Germany “had abused our foolishly generous hospitality.”
This is not quite accurate, since we were neither so generous nor
hospitable as careless and lazy. We allowed our trades to slip through
our fingers--the State did nothing for native work, science, or
invention--and ambitious men of hope and endeavour left the country
in shoals to make fortunes in other lands, _many firms establishing
themselves in Germany in order to win the rewards denied them in their
native home_!